r victrolas; carpets of baby bracken; dark, slumbering
forests planted by forgotten Indians; stretches of fair country with
pools of moonlight ringed in shadow shores; then, _your_ dear old
seafaring town of Huntington, where to-night, by the way, I had a
glimpse of your own delightful butter-yellow house as we slipped along
the road between your lawn and the water. The weeping willows moving in
the breeze looked like silver fountains, and the thick blossoms of the
apple orchard might have been a million hovering white moths.

You and I had no such fancies in our heads that night, had we? We
didn't think that each side road we passed looked as if it led to
fairyland--more fools we! But I was always a fool. I see that now, when
my brain is suddenly seized with growing pains.

Just about at Northport you suggested the possibility of my wanting to
marry. I thought of that last night, as a glimpse of moonlit water
flashed under my eyes, and remembered how I laughed you to scorn. All
through those gay and vital young woods which wall the road beyond I
continued to idiotize, unable to see dryads dancing in the moonlight (as
_she_ and I saw them in the same spot to-night), careless that Nature
was distilling magic perfume for us from tree and fern and wild flower,
our eyes shut to the fact that elves disguised as Indian lilies were
using silvered ponds for mirrors.

Do you remember that lonely graveyard in the woods, relic of some
community of early settlers? "I'd as soon be dead and lying there as
live the life you want me to live!" said I, with a would-be wise nod of
the head as I drove past. But now I see too well that you were the wise
one. Why didn't Nature make me understand myself as I begin to
understand now? There must have been the same heart-searching perfume in
the woods that night--a blend of locust bloom with wild roses and the
bitter-sweet tang of young fox-grape tendrils swinging high among the
tree branches. Yet I could do no better than expound to you my
dry-as-dust opinions on marriage. Women, according to me, had only one
way of making a man happy, and thirty thousand ways of torturing him. I
wanted to have inscribed on my tombstone: "What did he do for the good
of womankind? He remained a bachelor." Most husbands and wives, I
thought, had the air of being married to foreigners whose mentality they
could never quite touch. I believed that I was cut out for a bad
husband, a disappointing friend, an irritat